Chapter 7 – A Lassi by any other name…..

.....would be called...wait...wait....I’m jumping the gun here. Lets go back to the beginning. As usual this story also involves food but not in as much detail. It all started with just another innocuous dinner. I was about finishing a nice big chole-bhatura and coating my arteries with a fresh layer of cholesterol when I felt like it would be nice to drink something to settle my stomach. I called the waiter over to my table and asked him for a glass of plain buttermilk. He smiled a sweet broken toothed smile, scratched his head and said that he didn’t have any buttermilk. So I then asked him for a bowl of curd to which he replied that he couldn’t do that. Exasperated I told him to forget it, thinking that I would pick up a pack of curd on the way home from some shop. The waiter started to amble away obviously a little anxious at having annoyed a regular customer, one that tips well too.

He took a few steps and turned around and shuffled his way back towards me. I was busy finishing my bhatura, with my head down close to the plate. I caught sight of his slippers and I looked up wondering if he had changed his mind about the curd. He was looking at me a little anxiously fidgeting with the tray in his hand. I nodded my head at him and he stepped closer to me and bent forward. He then asked me a question, which I will come to in a minute, that must have taken a lot of courage and burnt quite a few of the grey cells in his head. Keep in mind that just outside the restaurant is a fruit juice shop where you can get freshly squeezed fruit juices. So he bends sown and barely whispers, “Saar, thayir juice venumma?” (Do you want curd juice?) I was flummoxed, to say the least. What in the name of God was ‘Thayir juice’? The look on my face would have scared any lesser human away but the valiant soul that lingered behind those tattered pants and grimy checkered shirt was not about to give up. He repeated again, “Saar, thayir juice, that they put in a glass with sugar and give you”. Now I have something to say here. If all those great geniuses all through the ages had a light bulb go off somewhere every time they had a great idea (did stoneage man have large fires go off somewhere…is that why there’s none of them left!) then global warming is not really a recent occurrence. Blame those geniuses and their bulbs. If they had only used fluorescent lamps! Anyway…that lamp went off…I got his drift and nodded my head vigorously at which his face beamed with satisfaction and I am sure he was mentally walking down the line of ten grey cells remaining in his head and patting them one by one on the back for a job well done. He brought me back a nice, tall, cool glass of “Sweet Lassi” which I downed with extra satisfaction. I could have missed this delight if it had not been for the quick thinking waiter who managed to understand my need, the constraints, the available resources and put it all together in one delectable “thayir juice”. I tipped that guy extra that day and every day after for the courage it must have taken to come up to me and ask me a stupid (in his own view) question and follow it up with some visionary thinking.

So why am I making a big deal of this. Because just two days earlier I had asked his boss, the manager, for a Lassi and he had given me a rude, “No! We don’t have anything like that here.” Which is why I was asking for buttermilk and curd in the first place and not for a Lassi. In his favor, the uneducated (but divinely gifted) waiter had seized on the opportunity to provide ‘customer service’ in its very intended form and showed that ‘manager’ a thing or two about thinking outside the box.

Lassi is now a featured item on the board outside their restaurant.